My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 829: Deluded Woman

What had she done, really, to be regarded like this?

Did she not deserve more than that? More than the flat, dismissive, unadorned hatred in his eyes when he’d turned to face her in the dim penthouse — eyes that had once, not so very long ago, found her across impossible distances and winked.

Winked! With that insufferable, sardonic, devastatingly deliberate amusement that made her grip tighten on Yūrei no Kiba’s hilt and her pulse do something in her throat that ten thousand years of martial discipline should have rendered categorically impossible.

Where was the teasing? Where were the games — the provocations, the calculated little moments when he’d look directly at the coordinates Eira had furnished him and let her feel his gaze landing on her like a hand placed on the back of her neck?

Where was the boy who had made a sport of reminding the invisible assassin that she was not as invisible as she believed?

Consort couldn’t help asking herself all of this.

And couldn’t help answering, with the cold, lacerating honesty of a woman who had spent millennia refusing to lie to herself and was not about to commence now; that she was the hypocrite...

...The consummate, unmitigated hypocrite:

To think that everything she had done to him would be absolved simply because he’d teased her a few times from behind the safety of a window.

Was it even teasing?

Or was it merely him playing games? Tactical games and calculated provocations, executed with the preternatural strategic intelligence that made him so infuriatingly dangerous — the best way to unsettle an adversary was to make them believe they were being courted when they were merely being studied.

She was the fool who had read between lines that weren’t there; the idiot who peered into the margins of his behavior and invented whole libraries of implications that existed nowhere except inside the fevered architecture of her own desperate, deluded little mind.

Well. She hadn’t believed it entirely. Not all the way. Not with the totality of conviction that would have constituted genuine self-deception.

But it had been enough.

Enough that she had dared — dared — to watch his entire congress with his women. Not from obligation or surveillance mandate her mistress had issued; but because she wanted to...

...Because she would hover outside whatever window he was behind like some pathetic, lovesick shadow, and watch his hands traverse another woman’s body, watch his mouth descend upon another woman’s skin, and then retreat to the estate and close her eyes and transpose herself into the scene — replacing whichever lucky woman he’d been devouring with herself;

His hands on her. His mouth on her. His weight bearing down on her body and his voice murmuring the filthiest obscenities into her ear while she came apart like the ancient, pathetic wreck she was.

She was the one who fantasized and replaced herself into his women’s places and touched herself.

More and more; what had started as something small — a furtive, shameful, barely-acknowledged tremor between her thighs the day he’d dominated Cassiopeia against that window, pressing the Maxton woman into the glass while the city glittered below them like an audience too polite to look away — had metastasized into a ritual.

A compulsion. A nightly degradation she performed upon herself with increasing desperation and diminishing restraint, fingers working between her thighs while the phantom of his touch ghosted across her skin and her teeth sank into her own lip to silence the sounds she refused to acknowledge she was making.

Like some lust-drunkfool who couldn’t even govern her own cunt after ten thousand years of perfect, arrogant control.

Consort would bite her lip until pain blurred with pleasure, because even in solitude some stubborn, deranged corner of her pride feared being overheard.

By whom?

The furniture?

The gods?

Her own dignity, lying dead somewhere in the corner?

Ridiculous.

Obscene.

Unacceptable; and still she wanted him.

’How had it come to this?’

How had she become this woman?

How had she even begun developing such proclivities? She — the Crimson Consort. The blade of the One Above...

The instrument that had ended dynasties and extinguished bloodlines and walked through the annals of ten millennia without once — not once — permitting a man to register on the seismograph of her desire.

Then Phei appeared.

Seventeen.

Seventeen, for heaven’s sake; a number so offensively small that history itself should have intervened, slapped her across the face, and told her to find a hobby.

Yet there he was, carrying the presence of ancient calamities in a young body, looking at gods as if they were misbehaving guests, making bloodlines tremble, women fall, and reality itself develop obedience issues.

Consort had served the One Above for ten thousand years, only to be emotionally ambushed by a boy with dragon blood, pretty eyes, and the dangerous habit of speaking as if the universe were a servant who had forgotten its place.

The comedy was pitch black.

’Luckily, her mistress doesn’t know.’

That small mercy remained intact, and Consort clung to it with both hands.

The One Above was omniscient in the grand, terrifying sense. Her awareness stretched through existence like an invisible net, catching motion, memory, intention, and consequence in threads too fine for ordinary beings to perceive; nothing escaped her by accident.

But while the One Above was omniscient in the general sense — all-perceiving, all-cataloguing, a consciousness that stretched across the fabric of existence like a net too fine for anything to pass through — Consort knew how to circumvent that gaze.

Most of the One Above’s omniscience was, in point of fact, routed through Consort herself. The mistress saw what the blade saw. And a blade that closed its eyes saw nothing.

A very convenient loophole.

A disgraceful one, yes. Spiritually bankrupt, strategically dubious, and beneath the dignity of someone with her title. But loopholes existed to be used:

Creation had been built with back doors, apparently, because the gods, like mortals, enjoyed making things just complicated enough to become everyone’s problem later.

So, the One Above did not know.

Not the watching, the wanting, fantasies or the shameful little rituals Consort had performed in the privacy of her chambers, with her breath caught behind her teeth and Phei’s name burning behind her closed lips.

So.

Now — standing in the dim penthouse, receiving the undiluted weight of his contempt — Consort apprehended, with the nauseating clarity of a woman being forced to examine her own reflection in a mirror she had been studiously avoiding, that she was the only one who had been deluded from the inception... receiving the full weight of his contempt, she understood the truth with sickening clarity.

She had been alone in the delusion from the start.